CAREER: Enabling Design of In Situ Forming Lipid-based Lyotropic Liquid Crystalline Gels (iL3Gels) at Liquid-Liquid Interfaces

Modern medical treatments depend on soft materials that interact with the human body. One such material includes gels used in drug delivery, tissue repair, and cancer therapy. This project focuses on a promising class of gel-like materials made from lipids: fat-based molecules that naturally assemble into cell-membrane-like structures. Unlike conventional gels manufactured in advance, these lipid materials can form in place when two liquids come into contact. This offers new opportunities for minimally invasive therapies and advanced manufacturing. Despite their promise, there is a lack of fundamental understanding of how these gels form, what controls their stability, and how their internal structure can be reliably shaped for practical use. This award will help enable next-generation biomaterials that are scalable, customizable, and compatible with biomedical applications. A virtual reality (VR) platform of the research laboratory will be created, allowing students and teachers to explore biomaterials science. This platform will also support K–12 outreach, undergraduate education, and public engagement. This award is aligned with national priorities in advanced manufacturing and biotechnology. This award will establish a predictive framework for the formation and functional use of lipid-based lyotropic liquid crystalline gels that assemble at liquid–liquid interfaces. The research will pursue three integrated objectives: (1) elucidating the compositional, thermodynamic, and kinetic factors governing gel formation, stability, and phase behavior; (2) predicting phase trajectories and morphological transitions using mass-transfer modeling and structural simulations; and (3) demonstrating controlled gel printing by manipulating interfacial flow instabilities and structural parameters relevant to biomedical applications. The work will target lipid-rich regions of multicomponent phase space that remain underexplored relative to water-rich systems traditionally used in nanocarrier design. By combining experimental characterization with modeling, the project will generate new insights into interfacial self-assembly, phase transitions, and mesoscale structure formation that can be applied to liquid-in-liquid 3D printing strategies. The project will integrate the research with a VR laboratory, multimedia resources, student and educator training, and regional symposia, creating a scalable and transferable model for biomaterials and bioprinting education across academic levels. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria. NSF Award ID: 2543002 | Program: 01002627DB NSF RESEARCH & RELATED ACTIVIT | Principal Investigator: Zahra Niroobakhsh | Institution: University of Missouri-Kansas City, COLUMBIA, MO | Award Amount: $535,000 View on NSF Award Search: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/show-award/?AWD_ID=2543002 View on Research.gov: https://www.research.gov/awardapi-service/v1/awards/2543002.html